The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,280 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 46% higher than the average critic
  • 5% same as the average critic
  • 49% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 4.2 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 61
Highest review score: 100 Short Cuts
Lowest review score: 0 Gummo
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 9,381 out of 20280
  2. Mixed: 8,435 out of 20280
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20280
20280 movie reviews
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  1. Daughters of the Dust
    For all its harsh allusions to slavery and hardship, the film is an extended, wildly lyrical meditation on the power of African cultural iconography and the spiritual resilience of the generations of women who have been its custodians.
  2. Grand Canyon
    [Grand Canyon] eventually pulls its punches, taking an unconvincingly beatific look at the problems and dangers that have been so persuasively outlined in what has come before. But until it hits that false note, Mr. Kasdan's film is at least as fascinating as it is amorphous.
  3. The Prince of Tides
    The Prince of Tides marks Ms. Streisand's triumphantly good job of locating that story's salient elements and making them come alive on the screen.
  4. Until the End of the World
    The longer it gets, the loopier it gets. [19 Jan 1992, p.13]
    • The New York Times
  5. High Heels
    High Heels has no real mirth and not even enough energy to keep it lively.
  6. Father of the Bride
    The screenplay represents recycling at its best. The material has been successfully refurbished with new jokes and new attitudes, but the earlier film's most memorable moments have been preserved.
  7. JFK
    The movie, which is simultaneously arrogant and timorous, has been unable to separate the important material from the merely colorful.
  8. Bugsy
    Allen Daviau's camera work and Albert Wolsky's costumes help to forge the film's high style, as does Ennio Morricone's score. But much of its elan comes from Mr. Levinson's obvious affection for the time and place that are his film's backdrop, and from the flair with which he stages even minor episodes.
  9. The Last Boy Scout
    Mr. Scott directs the film as if he were trying to win a prize for demolishing a building in record time. The opening is good: stylish video images of a night football game played in a torrential rain, climaxed by the only scene in the film that has legitimate shock. After that, the brutality and the pace don't slacken, but interest does.
  10. Night on Earth
    With this, his fourth commercially released feature, Mr. Jarmusch again demonstrates his mastery of comedy of the oblique. He seems to see his characters through a telescope, while attending to their talk with some kind of long-range listening device. Everything that is seen and heard is vivid and particular, but decidedly foreign. Meanings are elusive. Themes can be supplied by others. He's also becoming an increasingly fine director of actors.
  11. Hook
    Hook is overwhelmed by a screenplay heavy with complicated exposition, by what are, in effect, big busy nonsinging, nondancing production numbers and some contemporary cant about rearing children and the high price paid for success.
  12. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
    There are no signs of waning energy here, not even in an Enterprise crew that looks ever more ready for intergalactic rocking chairs. The principals' enthusiasm for their material has never seemed to fade. If anything, that enthusiasm grows more appealingly nutty with time.
  13. My Girl
    As directed by Howard Zieff, My Girl has a bizarrely light tone and an awkward pace, in part because it's hard for the director to keep track of the story's many half-developed subplots.
  14. Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse
    There have been few sharper portraits of the film maker as alchemist than Hearts of Darkness: A Film Maker's Apocalypse, in which Francis Ford Coppola is seen struggling with hellish logistical problems, wild-card actors, freak accidents and other unseen demons, then ultimately pulling a miracle out of his hat.
  15. The Double Life of Veronique
    The Double Life of Veronique doesn't end. About three-quarters of the way through, it starts to dissolve, like mist, so that by the time it is actually over the screen seems to have been blank for some time.
  16. Beauty and the Beast
    With Beauty and the Beast, a tender, seamless and even more ambitious film than its predecessor, Disney has done something no one has done before: combine the latest computer animation techniques with the best of Broadway.
  17. The Addams Family
    The film's aimlessness and repetitiveness eventually become draining. And its small touches often work better than its more elaborate ones, like an extended party sequence that seems awkward and largely unnecessary.
  18. Kafka
    Kafka is opaque without ever being mysterious, frightening or suggestive of anything but movie making. Its chases through dark narrow streets don't create suspense, since nothing is at stake.
  19. Little Man Tate
    As directed by Ms. Foster, the film has a kind of purity of purpose and control that is very rare in mass-market movies. It avoids a lot of sentimental nonsense. It is also sparely (and well-) written by Scott Frank.
  20. The People Under the Stairs
    Though the new movie has its share of blood and gore, it is mostly creepy and, considering the bizarre circumstances, surprisingly funny.
  21. Life Is Sweet
    Life Is Sweet, a title that should not be taken as irony, demands that the audience accept its meandering manner without expectations of the big dramatic event or the boffo laugh. It is very funny, but without splitting the sides.
  22. My Own Private Idaho
    The film itself is invigorating - written, directed, and acted with enormous insight and comic elan. [27 Sept 1991]
    • The New York Times
  23. Cool as Ice
    All it really wants to be is a hiphop answer to one of Elvis Presley's sillier vehicles. But the movie, which was directed by David Kellogg and written by David Stenn, fails to deliver an ounce of musical energy.
  24. Frankie and Johnny
    Mr. Pacino has not been this uncomplicatedly appealing since his Dog Day Afternoon days, and he makes Johnny's endless enterprise in wooing Frankie a delight. His scenes alone with Ms. Pfeiffer have a precision and honesty that keep the film's maudlin aspects at bay.
  25. Homicide
    Homicide, which refers to metaphorical as well as literal murder, may be Mr. Mamet's most personal and deeply felt work. It's also his most blunt and despairing. Both "House of Games" and "Things Change" deal with conspiracies of some sort. Yet the scam that is the center of this film is unconvincing.
  26. Ricochet
    The screenplay, by Steven E. de Souza (whose credits include the Die Hard movies), contains many glib, obscene wisecracks, plus the misinformation that Anna Karenina was Tolstoy's first book.
  27. Dogfight
    The film wants to be honest (and in its cruelties, it is), but the operative sensibility is that of a sitcom world. The characters aren't necessarily idealized, but they are flat and uninteresting. The material is lugubrious. The only seemingly spontaneous moment comes at the very end, which is too late.
  28. The Man in the Moon
    Until its final reel, when it strains badly to accommodate an almost biblical stroke of retribution, The Man in the Moon is a small, fond film that achieves a kind of quiet perfection.
  29. Necessary Roughness
    If the movie were a farcical free-for-all ridiculing the hyper-competitive world of college football, it might be amusing. But it can never decide whether to be an athletic answer to "National Lampoon's Animal House" or icky-inspirational like "Rocky."
  30. The Fisher King
    What emerges, in the end, are a clever premise that has been allowed to go awry and several performances that are lively and unpredictable enough to transcend the confusion. Mr. Bridges, always a fine intuitive actor, has never displayed a greater range.
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